It has been accused of ‘shaming Moscow’ and ‘punching the Russian soldier in the face’. But the makers of this powerful drama about dogfights and dangerous desires refuse to be silenced
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I can find gay love stories against the odds a bit triggering but this film has so many threads through time woven in Ukrainian, Russian, and Central European settings.
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Ryan Gilbey
Oleg Zagorodnii is sitting in the cafe he owns in Kyiv, beneath a brightly coloured painting of Aladdin smiling down from the wall behind. “It is just me now, no baristas,” says the Ukrainian actor via video call. “People come. I make them coffee, give them dessert. They are happy to feel some kind of normal life. They sit in the cafe, we play music, we speak. Of course, all we talk about is war.”
Zagorodnii has twice attempted to enlist in the army, only to be told that there are currently more volunteers than equipment. The best he can do is make appeals on social media for bulletproof vests, and use the cafe as a place to pass on food, supplies and military uniforms. “I try to do what I can in this terrible time,” he says.
It was only a year ago that the 34-year-old rented a small cinema in the city to screen the cold war love story Firebird for his family and friends. In this stirring British-Estonian production, Zagorodnii, who has the looks of a 1940s matinee idol, stars as Roman, a soon-to-be-married fighter pilot who falls for a young conscript, Sergey, played by Britain’s Tom Prior, after they meet at a military base in Soviet-occupied 1970s Estonia. Based on the autobiography of the late Sergey Fetisov, Firebird might resemble any tale of forbidden desire – except that Sergey and Roman face more than simply scandal should their relationship be discovered. The Soviet-era setting lends the film a distinctive thriller element: think of it as The Love Lives of Others.
When Zagorodnii landed the part, it was on the condition that he could master English in the three months before shooting began. “I knew only, ‘Hello, I am Oleg from Ukraine, my English very bad,’” recalls the actor. He also had to do five days of shooting practice. “So now, if someone gives me a gun, I know what to do with it.”
The war is never far from our conversation. “My agent found me the job on Firebird,” he continues. “But now I want to shame him because he supports this Russian aggression. He wrote to me, ‘Oleg, keep it easy, we will make you free from Zelenskiy and then we will live in a normal friendly country.’ He thinks America is doing all this! That is when we stop our discussion.”
Despite the initial language barrier between the two leads, the Estonian director Peeter Rebane knew Zagorodnii would be perfect as Roman. “It wasn’t just Oleg’s look but the way he held himself,” he says. “Tom is sensitive, artistic. Oleg has this matter-of-fact fighter-pilot quality. In hindsight, it helped that they were forced to communicate through looks and gestures at first, because that’s how it would have been between Sergey and Roman.”
Rebane first encountered Fetisov’s book a decade ago. “I was amazed,” says the 48-year-old film-maker. “Being gay was a criminal offence. After it was decriminalised with the fall of the Soviet Union, it was still seen as abnormal.” Rebane knew he was gay at the age of nine. “But even by the time I came out to my mother in my early 20s, her first reaction was still, ‘It’s OK, we can get help.’”
The knowledge that Sergey and Roman were falling in love in the very place where he grew up has given him, he says, a new perspective on LGBT people in his home country. “I could never have imagined that this kind of love story was happening there at that time. As small kids in occupied Estonia, my best friend and I would cycle near that same base. MiGs would fly overhead and we’d literally fall off our bikes.”
That memory calls to mind one of the film’s more irreverent moments: a cut from Sergey and Roman in the throes of passion to a pair of fighter jets whooshing overhead, which puts a knowing spin on the old, sexually suggestive image of a train thundering into a tunnel. “We had more discussions over that than anything,” laughs Rebane. “A German critic who saw an early version told us, ‘I love the film but this shot kills it.’ But I wanted Firebird to seem as though it was made in the 1970s rather than now.”
When he cast Prior, who played Stephen Hawking’s teenage son in The Theory of Everything, he got more than just a leading man. The actor suggested changes to the script, which led to him co-writing with Rebane a series of new drafts. These foregrounded the oppressive, paranoid conditions under which Sergey and Roman were forced to live. As they tried to raise funding to make the film, Prior also became co-producer and music supervisor, later having a hand in the editing. The pair subsequently established a distribution company to release Firebird in the UK. If the actor doesn’t show up at screenings to personally glad-hand each cinemagoer, it will be a shock.
For all his multitasking, Prior’s passion for Firebird ultimately comes back to the role of Sergey. “It resonated instantly with me,” says the 31-year-old. “He has this radical quality of following his heart at all costs. We chose very consciously not to show him full of self-doubt and shame, qualities often associated with this kind of story. That’s something I also embrace. I’m not very good at lying to myself.”
He and Rebane travelled to Moscow in 2016 to meet Fetisov, finding his company every bit as joyful as his prose. “Some of the people who were closest to him didn’t know his story,” says Prior. “He certainly wasn’t ashamed of who he was. He openly flirted with a male waiter when we were in a restaurant in Moscow. Any suffering he experienced was not in relation to his identity.”
Fetisov’s death in 2017 at the age of 64 only hardened their resolve to tell his story. “We had made a promise to him,” says Rebane. Fetisov’s only stipulation, recalls Prior, was that “the film should be about love, not politics. Of course, it’s going to be received in a more political way now. But we wanted to make a universal story about what it means to go after love at any cost.”
Remarkably for a film with such overtly gay content, several exterior scenes were filmed in Moscow. “An amazing local production company paid the right people and somehow made that happen,” says Prior. “We still don’t fully understand.” Even more surprising was the picture’s acceptance last year by the city’s film festival, though only the first of its scheduled screenings went ahead. “After that,” adds Prior, “there was a complaint about it being ‘homosexual propaganda’. We had 93 press articles written about it, all but one of which were negative. One headline translated as, ‘An Estonian, a Brit and a Ukrainian shame Moscow.’ Another called the film ‘a punch in the face of the Russian soldier’. It wasn’t technically banned but all tickets were cancelled. The film played to an empty auditorium.”
An unexpected consequence of the invasion of Ukraine is that some countries have expressed a reluctance to release Firebird now that the appetite for Russian stories is negligible. Prior is justifiably flabbergasted at this. “Russia silenced this film,” he says. “They don’t want it shown. So to not screen it is kind of doing what Putin wants.” Getting the message out is currently his priority, though he concedes it won’t be easy. “Someone online said, ‘Why would you go and watch a Russian movie right now?’” Throughout our conversation, Prior has been eloquent and articulate. Only now do words fail him. “It’s like… arrrgghh!”
For Zagorodnii, the invasion has made talking about Firebird bittersweet. “It is like it’s from another world, you know? Sergey and Roman are ready to die for their love. And in Ukraine, we are ready to die for our freedom, our land, our people. Before war, I built plans for my future. Now I understand my dreams have died because I must stay here and be with my people. I don’t know anything now about the future. I understand only that every day is more death, more destruction. Before this, we were independent. We didn’t need help. We needed only one thing: don’t touch us. I can’t understand why Russia did this.”
He rubs his face, suddenly exhausted. I mumble something hopelessly inadequate about the world supporting Ukraine. “We feel your support,” he says sadly. “But how can this happen?”
i looked at romka and suddenly was overcome with thoughts about loneliness and the realization that i had almost lost him that night. my soul filled with tenderness and sadness, and I reached for romka, who was breathing deeply and seemingly enjoying another moment of calm. and suddenly the most obvious thought came to my mind — love is never easy but it does exist.
— firebird by sergey fetisov
[ID: eight black and white gifs of Roman and Sergey in Firebird. Roman's plane has just barely escaped crashing, and he's sitting in the cockpit mulling over the engine failures.
GIF 1: A pensive, shell-shocked looking Roman, blinking slowly as his throat bobs around a swallow.
GIF 2: A wide shot of Sergey climbing the ladder to get to Roman, then showing a closeup of Sergey reaching for Roman's hand. Roman seems to snap out of his daze at the action.
GIF 3: Roman turning to look at Sergey, clasping their hands together as they smile at each other. Sergey seems to exhale with relief, leaning closer to Roman.
GIF 4: Roman leaning down to press kisses on the back of Sergey's hand while Sergey watches him.
GIF 5: Roman looking up at Sergey, who fists the collar of Roman's jacket and shakes his head slightly, dragging him closer into a passionate kiss. Roman cups the side of Sergey's face as their eyes fall closed.
GIF 6: Roman pulling back to surge into Sergey's arms. Sergey tucks his face into Roman's neck, his hand sliding into Roman's hair and wrapping around his shoulder to hold him close. His face is twisted with desperate relief.
GIF 7: Roman's hand moving to cup the back of Sergey's hand, fingers scrubbing through his hair repeatedly. Sergey moves to cup Roman's shoulder, still holding him close.
GIF 8: Roman and Sergey pulling back to lock eyes, Roman's hand folding Sergey's ear briefly before cupping his cheek, both of Roman's hands holding Roman tightly. They smile knowingly at each other.
In the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth.
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show
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